Inflight Entertainment

I was on a plane and I was bored with the movies and sleep doesn’t come easily any more, as my mother would say,” too much guilt.” Anyway as part of writing better resolution thing I took at the beginning of the year, I wrote this because there was nothing else to do…

There is something about travelling that I will never understand. Well actually I do understand but I just can’t accept it. Why is it that whenever I pack a bag, it never comes out right?

If you have ever seen the movie the Accidental Tourist there is part in the beginning where the protagonist tells the audience the art to travelling is to carry just one carry-on bag with the minimum of clothing. The best combination will be one jacket and two pants socks, shirts, socks, underwear and a good book or at least a large one that will tell people that you are busy and help keep them away from you.

I used to try that. In fact I was quite good at it. The last time that I went to London I had a small bag with just the right amount of clothing for long week-end. I laughed at my friend when we met at Heathrow We had departed the US from separate cities. He had with him a large almost steamer trunk like wheeled bag and a smaller one that hung from his shoulder. I asked him if he was the one who had actually decided to carry the kitchen sink with him. I hadn’t known at the time that he had decided to buy out half of London and then turn to my credit cards when he had run out on his.

The other thing that I didn’t know was that once I was back at Philadelphia I would be subjected to questioning by customs and immigration and then further questioning by customs and immigration once they took a look at my at my carry-on and told me that it was much too small an amount of luggage for someone to be travelling from Europe with and just what exactly had I been doing there, who with what and when. Of course he irritated me, but I tried not to show it which failed and we both started circling each other as men often do when they want to show whose dick is bigger. When I told another friend what happened, he said that if it had been up to him he wouldn’t have let me back into the country.

So this time I’m heading to Rome for the weekend and I’m writing this on the flight and I’m wondering why is it that this time I have a bag that I thought that I would never be able to fill and yet it is? Why is it that I have so many more things with me than I need but I’m also starting to make a mental list of the things that I forgot to pack or didn’t even think about? I mean really, do I really need to travel with two cameras, lenses, this computer and an iPod. Well in all honesty I don’t go anywhere without the iPod, I’d rather lose a limb than that. And why is it that in a row of four seats in between the two aisles of the plane the woman next to me feels the need to spread herself out and takeover not just hers but both the of other unoccupied seats? Doesn’t she feel or think that I would like a little room too.

Maybe I should just get some sleep before I start to notice the difference between those passengers that are used to flying and those that aren’t. Like that man over in there diagonally across from me as he tries to curl forward on to some sort of flat pillow pressed against the TV screen in the back of the head rest in front of him. Poor fellow probably doesn’t realize that his seat can lean backwards and thus have less chance of a crick in the neck which he will have when he leaves this plane.

This has been more of a ramble than I thought it would have been. Oh well I’ll post this tomorrow when I arrive at the hotel I guess, unless I collapse from exhaustion.

Disease of the Month

So it looks like I’m not going to die, at least not today, or if it is today it won’t be from swine flu.

I was on the El in West Philly yesterday and a woman was talking to a man across the aisle from her and she declared to him loudly and thus to the rest of the car load of people, that swine flu was over and there was no longer any need for us to worry about it and that some man without a Green Card had brought it into the US and that he had been found and everything was Ok now. Thank God for bureaucracy and racists; they will explain away all the ills of the world with their inane theories.

However racism didn’t explain the hacking and sneezing and the worrying that I had gone through last week. Well I didn’t actually worry, not openly at least. It didn’t explain why I thought that everyone else who decided to cough or sneeze while not even trying to cover up figured they could to do it in my presence whether they were black or white or anything in between. Nor did it explain my burning desire to give them a swift kick in the nuts and give them a real reason to cough, but I digress. Racism also doesn’t explain why the number of infections keeps rising around the world but unless you live in Mexico, that doesn’t seem to be that big a deal by the press. Nor does it really explain the constant head pounding that I’ve been going through for the last few weeks, but we’ll go into that later.

I think that when I write the story of my life and all the trials that I have gone through, the chapters involving illnesses and near death experiences will need at least one chapter all to itself. And I’m not even talking about the hospitalizations that had as a child. The stomach thing that I had two weeks old, or the pneumonia at two years old or the appendicitis flare up at eight or the broken limbs that get as a child or even the cancer scare a few years ago when I thought to myself, “So this is how it’s going to be... where are my cigarettes?”

What I will talk about will be the time when I battled SARS or bird flu and when someone sneezed in the food court near where I worked while I was buying Chinese food and I had to run out of there for my life and well being. I've never been proud of that moment, but I can't take it back Then there was the time that the West Nile Virus was coming down from New York and each time I took a shower I would have to lotion my body and follow it with a good dose of mosquito repellent. It was last year I think when I got bit by a tick on the inside of my knee from being in the back yard or doing some shit I shouldn’t have doing in grassland somewhere. I could still see the bite marks two weeks later and I thought this was it. This time I really believed that I had Lyme’s Disease because I could feel it burrowing into my bones and destroying my nervous system soon to be followed by stroke and or renal failure. I spoke to my doctor and he laughed at me. Bitch.

It’s not that I’m a hypochondriac, but unlike some people I know that I’m going to do die. I've never heard of anyone living forever and I would like my death to be just a little later rather sooner and by something much more ordinary and less exotic than the disease of the month.

What I do have, or suffer from is Alexithymia, but that’s more of a psychological thing though that's not even recognized by some and it affects me physically. One day I may go into it but not today. Oh and the headaches, well I started getting those when Natasha Richardson died from her skiing accident. Although since I don’t remember skiing since I was eleven and I don’t recall hitting my head more than usual on something, so I don't think it's a build up of blood from a leaky brain. I’ll just put it down to allergies, they seem to get worse and worse as I get older. Who was it that said “old age ain’t for sissies?” They certainly knew what they were talking about.

Borderline

I don't really know what this is about, the duplicity of life maybe, I don't know? But it seems like it was a lot of fun to make. What do you think?

Rambling Relays

I think I’m trying to avoid writing about something. There are a couple of things that are on my mind, but I don’t know how to go about writing them. I tell myself I just need to season the idea little, turn a phrase here or there and relate it to this or that so that I can be comfortable with it, but I never do. I have a few unfinished pieces on Word with one or two paragraphs and that’s it. Truth be told, even if I were to go back to them, they’d be so old that I probably couldn’t figure out what it was that I was trying to say originally. So I will just ramble on a bit.

It’s Penn Relay weekend and I have nothing that I want to do. There are of course the games. But I think that I have gotten to an age where I am just interested in the athletic performances and not the ancillary performances of the spectators looking for dates or whatever both in and out of the stadium that often accompanies the Relays.

If I were to go with friends, I would be the one seen as putting a downer on the whole thing because I would be the one looking to see who was winning a race, whereas they would be the ones looking to see who had the most to jiggle up front, or behind, or see who was built like a brick shit house and what they’d like to do with them. Not that there’s anything wrong that, but what the hell does it mean to be built like brick shit house anyway? I can see the brick house part, but where and how does shit make it even more of a compliment?

Anyway, since it is Relay Weekend that means that it’s the official or unofficial Black Gay Pride weekend in Philadelphia. It also means that there will be plenty of parties that I will not be invited to and I few where I wouldn’t show up even if I were invited because I never have been a real party person unless of course the liquor was flowing the way that it should be and or I was comfortable with the people that were there. It also means that there will be the clubs or bars dedicated to getting that black gay dollar this weekend from people of questionable ages that I will also avoid like the plague, just because I know how the kids get when they are trying to act all grownup and Miss Thing. God, was I ever like that? Also could I make these sentences any longer? Changing gears.

Today I was out in the sun for a few hours doing a few things and decided that I would go to my gym for quick shit and a shower because I was feeling sweaty and stinky. Actually I’m joking about a quick shit because I have something about public toilets that one or two therapy sessions still wouldn’t be able to help me with and why I thought showering and putting back on the same stinking clothes would make a difference is beyond me. But there I was drying off and I noticed I had a tan line on my upper arms from wearing a tee-shirt.

And?

Well for me, that’s a big thing. I am dark and I can get even darker. One time I went to Guadeloupe and I turned so dark there were highlights that I saw on my chest that were actually purple when the sun hit it just right. That was interesting. It was also fun. Nice work if you can get it and it’s time to start working on that again and getting back to my Maasai roots. "But the Maasai are from East Africa” you say, “and slaves were taken from West Africa.” To which I would reply that my family has always travelled and who is to say that they weren’t vacationing in sunny Ghana or Nigeria at the time?

I was going to downshift even further and talk about another “Golden Girl” leaving us but I think that I’ve gone on too long as it is and may leave it for another day. Nevertheless I truly believe that Betty White is going to survive everybody and keep working although at this point that’s not going to be much of a bet, but I’m still taking wagers right now if you’re interested.

Tea for Two or Taxes?

I finished my taxes at about 12:30am on Wednesday night or Thursday morning the 16th if you want to get technical and work for the IRS. But I figure I had lived in the Hawaii instead of the east coast I would have still had a few hours to go before it was midnight so I think that will be my defense if I should hear anything like late filing fees or any nonsense like that.

Why was I so late? No real reason I suppose. I thought it would take about 20 minutes since I was using Turbo Tax but instead since I had nothing like the records I needed, ready or in front of me, so it took almost 2 hours with a short smoke break in between. I just need to be so much more organized in my life. I’m still looking for a credit card that I took out from wallet some time ago and have no idea where I put it. I would call the bank and tell them that it’s lost but since I seem to lose my credit cards or wallets every 18 months, they may decide not to send me another one. The card has been owned by Chase since the beginning of the year and looking at their website they don’t seem to be as friendly as when it was owned by Wamu, or Providian, or whoever owned it before those two. Where am I going with this?

Oh, when I was doing my taxes it finally hit me what all these Tea Parties that were being held in different places were about. It was tax day and people were protesting about the supposed increase in taxes that will be coming in the future due to the increase in government spending today. No taxation without representation. Folks were doing a present day version of the Boston Tea Party and not the afternoon tea parties they have under the rotunda of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philly. I will say, you have to wake up pretty damn early in the morning to slip one over on me, hee hee.

I am just so out of touch with things nowadays. Maybe it’s because I drink coffee like the girl below so I can’t relate.

The Ten Commandments

For some reason I have developed certain TV movie and traditions over the years for which I have no explanation for. Like, and I have never told anyone this before, I always cry when I watch the Sound of Music. When Capt. Von Trapp is hiding on the roof top or grave yard, I’m never quite sure, with his family while the Nazis search for them. Then Rolfe who is in love with one of the girls finds them and betrays them, tears will just start to roll down my cheeks. I don’t plan to do it. I don’t even plan to watch the movie, but I always catch it and I always feel shivers up my spin during that scene.

Another tradition is watching the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments every year around Easter. I try not to, but as soon as I switch on to the local ABC station and see it playing, I will forget whatever I was doing or planning to do and watch as much as I can. That means I watching it up to when the Israelites who were singing and dancing and having sex around the Golden Calf fall into the pit of fire, or 2 minutes away from the end credits. Did I say people were having sex around the Golden Calf? I may have been projecting. That probably happened at the clubs that I used to go to where the white people acted like they reliving the Golden Calf scene and the black people mainly stood on the outskirts trying to get a look at what was going on so they could condemn it later. Ah memories.

The strange thing is, I don’t even like The Ten Commandments. I remember seeing it on the big screen in the late 70’s and I was impressed by it. But since then, the more and more that I’ve seen I realize that it’s really a bad movie. The actors all play as if they are acting for the people in the balcony with stultified gestures and over the top dialogue that came straight out of the 1920’s. In fact in this version, I bet if you were turn the sound down for 30 or 45 minutes you would still know what was going on because it seems like the director, old Cecil B. himself, used his notes from his 1923 version of the movie. And the fact that ABC has turned a 3 hour movie into a 4½ hour movie with commercials doesn’t really help.

I can’t help myself, I have to watch it. Each year I have to look and see if I can find where Edward G. Robinson says, ”Where’s you Moses noowww?” I’ve never caught it, only heard people say it's there. I still thrill at Yul Brynner saying with hands on hips, “So let it be written, so let it be done.” And I still love to watch Anne Baxter vamp up her interpretation of Gloria Swanson or some other silent screen great, but with sound; and all of this in glorious Technicolor.

Some people get dressed in silly hats or ill fitting suits or chase around for hard boiled eggs that will put them at risk for salmonella poisoning to celebrate Easter, I watch The Ten Commandments, so sue me. What do you do?

Pieces of Eight

It’s funny how so many of the things that we believe in when we are children slowly disappear as we grow up.


When I was young, out of the many professions or occupations that I thought about doing when I got older, becoming a doctor or a lawyer were never listed as the ones that would interest me. Of course my only interaction with either one of these professions was limited to the occasional doctor’s visit and what I could see on TV. Neither vocations excited me. What did enthuse me from watching TV however, was the idea of become a pirate.

Even though I didn’t know then and still don’t know now what swash buckling was, I was thrilled by the thought of doing it for a living. I dreamed of ordering the canon to be shot broadside against the enemy ships, swinging from the ropes when boarding them, swordplay, screaming “arghh matey” and “shiver me timbers” and scaring the women folk. It was a job where all men were equal unless you were the captain, and you didn’t have to explain your skin color or your religion or why you hadn’t had sex with a girl even though every male you knew said that they had. Yet I knew deep down that those days were over and that it would be one more dream that would never be fulfilled. That is until recently.

It was only a few years ago while watching 60 Minutes or some other news show that I heard about the many small boats and yachts that were being robbed by bandits as they sailed the Caribbean. It was a kind of modern day act of piracy that got a few bucks for the perpetrators. The big money events, I would learn last year or the year before were going to the pirates out of Somalia where they would hijack the larger ships and tankers operating in the Gulf of Aden between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, leading to the Indian Ocean.

Apparently these brigands will come upside of the ships in little motorized boats, throw some grappling hooks and climb on board before anyone knows what’s happening and take over the boat. Then they’ll hold it hostage until payment has been made by the owners for whatever cargo the boat is carrying. The real big haul is when they can get a super tanker full of oil worth millions of dollars and take home some prize money of say 10% of the oil’s value.

Unless you having been living under a rock for the last few days, then you would probably know at least a little about the present situation where a US flagged ship, the Maersk Alabama was the first ship since I guess the days of the Barbary Pirates to be attacked by buccaneers. I’m not going to comment on the circumstances other than I hope that it doesn’t turn into an Obama version of the situation Clinton faced with the Branch Davidians in Waco Texas. But I will say it doesn’t seem to be as glamorous as when Errol Flynn and his like portrayed pirating on the silver screen. In fact, it seems like a dull thing to do and kind of silly position to be in once you’ve been surrounded by what looks like the US 7th fleet.

Oh well, another childhood belief dashed to pieces.

The Art of the Accountant

I don’t think that I have given my explanation of our present financial or economic crises and how it came about. Now I suppose I could go into explaining about sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps and collateralized bond obligations, but I bet you already know about those. Instead, I’ll just give you a quick allegory. Tell me if you have heard this one before? You probably have, it’s about 40 years older than my father and he’s been dead for almost 10 years now.

There is this boss who is hiring for a position in his company and he has 3 people come in to the office to interview for it. While interviewing the 3 people separately, he asks them the same question, “What is two plus two?”

The first candidate was a lawyer and he answered the question using historical and legal precedents, bringing up references to the Napoleonic Civil Code, the Magna Carta and even a few passages from the Koran and the Talmud. Finally he said, “As you can see, historically, ethically and legally, there is only one number that can be found to be a true representation of the sum of two plus two, and that can only be four.”

The second person was an engineer and thought there must be some trick involved, but she answered much more simply, "Depending on whether you’re dealing with positive or negative numbers," she said, "the answer could be plus four, zero, or minus four.”

The third person was an accountant and when he was asked the question, he looked to his right and then he looked to his left. He looked at the interviewer straight into his eyes and then he got up and walked over to the window. He pulled the venetian blinds down and closed them. Then he walked over to the door of the office, opened it and took a quick look outside. He closed the door and made sure that it was locked so that no one would enter. He walked back over to the desk and leaned over looking his potential boss in the face and said barely above a whisper, “How much do you want it to be?”

And that’s the crisis in a nutshell. Not enough people willing to give us a straight answer. Just accountants and CEO's and Madoffs telling us what they think we want to hear.

Here endeth the lesson.

G-20....Bingo!!

This picture would be funny if you knew the movie this referenced, trust me on that. If you want you can click on it and I'll show you what I mean.

I was going to write about something personal today, but I haven't figured out how to put it down. Instead I think I could do some gossip about Operah's girl school or Madonna's attempt to adopt another African child, but I don't really care about either. So if you don't mind, here are just a few pictures that I've stolen from the news organizations and few thoughts behind them.

You know if there is one thing that I can say about Hillary Clinton it's that she seems to be having the time of her life knowing that no matter what happens, few people are going to blame her if it all goes terribly wrong.

Could this really be the face or faces of our salvation that will lead us from our economic doom or will they guide us to it?

And when exactly did the Obamas think that they would go from the picture above to the picture below?


Or even to this picture where if I could recognize more than 7 or 8 world leaders who may be determining my future, I would be doing well.



You know the last time I lived in London, the only black policeman I knew about was the one that did traffic control outside of the Hammersmith Odeon. I wonder what happened to him.

Also the only riot that I have ever been in was during one of the Notting Hill Carnival riots in the late 70's where the police didn't really have riot gear to speak of.




I remember before crossing the police line to see things from the other side, how 1 constable had picked up headboard from a twin bed and proceded to defend himself from the bricks and rocks that were being hurled at his position. Crack! was the sound of a brick as it made contact with the headboard. Crack! was the sound of the second brick as the policeman swatted it away. At that sound, all of us behind him started to clap as if he was up at bat playing cricket at Lords. It was a very British riot.

Sometimes I miss those days.

Girls Gone Wild?

You know one of my guilty pleasures was the show Dateline on NBC where they would find someone interested in having sex with a teenager, have him go to a house and expose him on national TV. It would be fun to see some of them arrive with liquor in one hand and condoms in the other ready to strip and do the do with someone they had never seen before.


However, that smell of sweet young pussy that they thought was in the air, was actually the smell of the moderator’s Old Spice soon to replaced by the smell shit as the alleged perpetrator soiled themselves when they figured that they were not only caught but on camera. I laughed at how some of them would protest their innocence swearing that this was just an aberration and would not happen again. I would smile knowing that they were about to get a knee to the back of the neck as the police arrested them on the ground. Another sexual predator would be behind bars and all would be well with the world.

Today I read on MSNBC that there were 3 teenage girls in Pennsylvania that were suing the District Attorney in Wyoming County to prevent him from charging them with child pornography and the distribution of such material. Apparently the girls had taken pictures of themselves partially dressed using their cell phones and as will happen with kids, the pictures found their way to the cell phones of their class mates. This, the DA says, was illegal.

Now I’m not sure how this will come out, but I wonder if it doesn’t come out in favor of the girls, will they have to go around for the rest of their lives listed as sexual deviants, listing their addresses with the local authorities each time they move? And if so can it happen to me?

I really don’t think I’ve done anything wrong, but a few years ago I was on one of the free and dirty beaches under the Pitons in St Lucia I took out my camera to take a scenery shot and the ex in the water. Some of the local boys who were playing on the beach decided they wanted me to take their picture and ran in front of me and started to pose. “No big deal,” I thought. I’m not good at taking pictures of people but the sooner I got this over with, the sooner they’d leave me alone. They would take a position without me prompting them, I would take a picture and they would run back and see the results.

I think it was the 3rd or 4th picture that I noticed that one of them was taking off his trunks and that there had been another who was already naked. I should have asked myself why they needed to get naked for me. Was this something that they did before for other people for other reasons? Where were their parents or why did one of them had a black eye? No, instead what I did think was that I was going to jail. I would probably get 10 years in St Lucia or life plus 10 in the US. To this day, even though I use one of the pictures on one of my credit cards, I still twitch expecting a knock on the door from the FBI.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for sex with children or child pornography in any form, but I wonder where do we draw the line and if the line was drawn already, was it done in the sand, where it's moveable and or easily erased? Will we stop at arresting little girls for being foolish and childlike, or will we go further?